Category Archives: Technology

Following a court ruling last week, Roku devices are now banned from being sold in Mexico. The decision comes cable provider Cablevisión, owned by media company Televisa, previously requested a court order to stop the sale of Roku devices in the country because hackers would use it to offer Roku owners pirated content from HBO, ESPN, and Televisa’s channels. Although Roku fought for a suspension of that order, the court’s decision last week upheld the ruling.

The Verge – Google News is launching its fact-checking feature in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, as part of the company’s ongoing efforts to counteract fake news. In a blog post published on Wednesday, Richard Gingras, VP of Google News, said that users in the three countries will now see links from fact-checking websites in Google News search results.

Fusion – The Mexican government has teamed up with several children’s rights organizations to launch a nationwide campaign against “sexting,” the practice of sending and receiving sexually explicit messages and/or images on mobile phones.

Yucatan Times – Dogsos is an app that promotes the “dog friendly” establishments, in which veterinarians, schools, hotels, restaurants, cafes and bars that operate under this concept will be consolidated under one website.

EFE – The number of Internet users in Mexico reached 62.4 million in 2015, representing 57.4 percent of the population. As for households, 39.2 percent of the total in the country have internet connection, representing an increase of 4.8 percent compared to 2014.

A relative of five youngsters who went missing past January 11, uses a computer as he camps at the public prosecutor’s office in Tierra Blanca community, Veracruz. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images)

By Cristina Silva / International Business Times

When Manuel Emilio Morato Mungaray started hosting hackathons in Mexico City two years ago, he wanted to persuade a generation of Mexican entrepreneurs that they could be the next Mark Zuckerberg. He put housewives, high school students, business majors and hipsters in the same room and started a dialogue about product design and solving problems by thinking of solutions others hadn’t tried.

“Mexico in my opinion is a very traditionalist country, it’s a country that is very rooted in the past,” Morato Mungaray, 28, said. “They don’t have access to the mind frame of Silicon Valley where it’s like, oh, I can conquer the world. Here, people say, ‘No, I can never be a Mark Zuckerberg’ and when they come to us, we say, ‘Of course you can.’”

Tech leaders in recent years have hailed Mexico City as one of the most dynamic startup scenes in Latin America, with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and prestigious universities producing 130,000 engineers per year, more than Canada, Brazil or even Germany. Investors from California have begun to notice, taking meetings in Mexico with startups hoping to change how Mexicans shop, eat and manage their businesses.

But even as a growing tech scene spreads across Mexico City’s trendiest neighborhoods in coffee shops and mescal bars brimming with educated young people, Mexico’s tech leaders have struggled to attract serious investors and persuade its best developers to stay put.

Omar Acoltzi works on his laptop in the beach section of Startup Mexico, an innovation campus in northwest Mexico City based loosely on Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. (Rick Jervis)

By Rick Jervis/ USAToday

With a master’s degree in business administration from MIT and spotless English, Hernán Fernández could have taken his skills to Silicon Valley or landed a cushy job with a Mexican bank.

Instead, he runs a small team of analysts in an office in the Polanco neighborhood of his native Mexico City, looking for Mexico’s next big tech breakout and helping forge his country’s new economy.

The tech fund created by Fernández, 36, and his partners, Angel Ventures Mexico, started in 2008 with a handful of employees and personal investments from friends and family. Today, the fund, which helps finance mostly tech companies in Mexico and the region, has grown to $20 million, with 29 employees spread through offices in Mexico City and in Bogotá and Lima, Peru. The firm is currently fundraising to grow the pot to $100 million.

“The new generation of Mexicans are tech savvy, more connected with the U.S., often U.S. educated,” Fernández said. “It’s impossible not to feel the … attraction of the start-up economy that goes on in the U.S.”

Mexico is emerging as one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in Latin America, with more than $1 billion in investments last year and more than 500,000 IT professionals.

MacRumors – Apple is planning a major retail store expansion in Latin America, starting with two stores in Mexico City. An internal document appears to confirm that Apple is hiring in Mexico City until Jan. 18.

Vanguardia – Xiaomi, the number one selling brand of smartphones in China, has reached Mexico. With its arrival in Mexico, the country has become the third largest market in Latin America, after Brazil and Colombia.

San Diego Union-Tribune – For the first time on the U.S. southern border, authorities have started conducting facial and iris scans on foreigners entering the country — part of a congressionally mandated effort aimed at cracking down on those who remain in the United States with expired visas.

El Sol de Nayarit – A study revealed that Mexicans’ favorite social network is Facebook. About a thousand Mexicans were interviewed, finding that 34 percent preferred Facebook followed by YouTube with 10 percent.

Vanguardia – The Mexican government eliminated 2.9 million low-income families from its plan to assist in the transition to digital television. Reasons given were that notifications went unanswered, people were dead and they live in places that have never had a television signal.

Radio Formula -Mechatronics engineering students at the Autonomous University of Puebla, have designed an intelligent cane to help the blind more safely navigate the streets and interiors of buildings.

CNNExpansión – Baja California Sur, Nuevo Leon and Baja California are the three states of Mexico where people have greater access to the internet. Guerrero, Zacatecas and Oaxaca are the least connected.

Reuters – Mexico will auction 80 MHz of wireless spectrum in January, the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) said. The regulator on Monday will start seeking public comment on its bid proposal before deciding the final terms and conditions for the auction.

El Punto Critico – Mexicans owned some 62.5 million smartphones, reaching almost six in 10 of the total number of mobile lines nationwide. The figure represents a growth of 41.4 percent over the same period last year.